


TMNT Spooky Gift Exchange 2020: Deadly Display

by Crowdog



Category: TMNT (2007), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blood, Comfort, Gore, Happy Ending, Horror, Hurt, Injury, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Romance, TSlash, Trauma, Turtlecest (TMNT), tcest, turtleslash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:01:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27104644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowdog/pseuds/Crowdog
Summary: An art show at the pier turns deadly when a windy night causes a very important lamp to turn off.
Relationships: Casey Jones/April O'Neil (TMNT) (background), Donatello/Michelangelo (TMNT) (implied), Leonardo/Raphael (TMNT)
Comments: 31
Kudos: 37
Collections: Tmnt Spooky Gift Exchange 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VenusTheMarvelTurtle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VenusTheMarvelTurtle/gifts).



> Beta Reader: [kalachelone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalachelone)  
> Event Organizer: [Caroaimezoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caroaimezoe)

“An art show?” Leo questioned, flipping the pamphlet over in his hand. There were glossy pictures of sculptures and paintings, live displays with plants and animals, disturbing political satire, and even a Hamster Circus.

Nothing was more shocking than the brother requesting they go. Not that he had verbally requested it, he had just handed Leo the pamphlet and let him come to the obvious conclusion.

“Yeah,” Raph said, voice curt as if Leo was stupid for asking what he was looking at.

Calling upon all of his strength, Leo kept his face blank and swallowed the swelling in his chest. Obviously Raph wasn’t asking Leo to go just with him. He likely wanted the whole family to attend.

“If you leave this in Mikey’s room I’m sure he will take it from there,” he stated evenly, holding the pamphlet out to Raph.

Raph snatched it back.

“Right,” he said, smoothing out the creases he made while awkwardly backing out of Leo’s room.

“An art show, though?” Leo asked before his brother could escape.

“Shut up,” Raph snapped defensively, holding onto the door frame tightly. “I can appreciate things,” he nearly spat each word onto Leo’s floor.

Leo nodded despite the fact that Raph had already closed the door forcibly and left. The gust of air it created drifted over the room. He turned back to his desk and continued translating his current leisure reading book into Spanish and Japanese to keep both languages sharp. His pencil eraser tapped his book for a few seconds. Normally this late at night Raph enters his bedroom for other reasons, more intimate reasons. He pushed his disappointment out of mind.

An art show sounded nice. He hoped his brothers would enjoy themselves.

* * *

At the breakfast table the day of the art show Leo listened as Mikey begged for them to go. There were so many reasons it would be the perfect outing. It was colder so they could wear baggy shell hiding clothes. It was a way to broaden their horizons and connect with modern culture.

Leo watched as Mikey clawed at Donnie begging him to attend. The inventor had a lot of things to do but it only took a few begging looks and whispered words before he decided to come.

Raph kept up an air of indifference. He was fortunate Mikey hadn’t questioned the pamphlet being on his bed, but now he was pushing it by throwing out comments about the art show being dumb.

The glances he shot Leo said otherwise.

Master Splinter thought the art show sounded wonderful. In fact Master Splinter was having a wonderful morning as he had found out Mikey and Donnie were a couple over breakfast. It was the seventh time inside that year that they had come out to Master Splinter, and the result was always the same. Parental approval and some questionable romantic advice.

Leo was no fool, he saw the melancholy on Raph’s face but again resisted the inclination to say anything. Instead he retreated inward sipping his tea quietly and listening to them all discuss the art show.

At the end of breakfast Mikey was an enthusiastic yes, Donnie was a begrudging yes, Raph was a reluctant but secretly thrilled yes, and Leo nodded but refused to say whether or not he was going.

He would try to avoid being roped in if he could. Even if it was their last outing before the snow started falling.

* * *

Leo’s plans to be absent when everyone gathered up to go to the art show were thwarted by Raph’s hovering. He was not left alone for a moment. Raph was constantly checking in on him and talking about the latest excuse Casey had as to why he couldn’t go.

Donnie had apparently suggested to Mikey that they invite April and Casey along. A kind gesture in the eyes of a less cynical turtle but Leo saw it for what it was.

If Donnie had to go to the art show with his partner, Casey had to with April.

Misery loves company.

Casey’s ridiculous excuses for being unable to attend gave Raph convenient reasons to check on Leo. Even though Leo had already seen Donnie and Mikey camping by the telephone holding their laughter back while April vented about her fiance’s excuses.

From the sidelines Leo watched with a certain longing. Whether it was to be part of the fun or to have someone to be part of the fun with. He felt too awkward to go over to them and ask for an update. Instead he settled for Raph’s casual and intrusive summaries.

“Casey tried to fake testicular torsion,” Raph chuckled as he barged into Leo’s room for the eleventh time that day.

“What’s testicular torsion?” Leo asked.

Raph shrugged, “’Dunno, but he doesn’t have it and his grandmother isn’t dead, she called while he was claiming he had the Spanish Flu.”

“The Spanish Flu?”

“I mean if he doesn’t want to go he should just sit April down and go hey babe, I don’t appreciate art, can you just go alone.” Raph said while inviting himself to sit on Leo’s bed.

Leo turned and leaned up against his desk. “I agree, being straight forward is always preferable in these situations.”

Raph nodded at the sage advice.

“In the same way one might be honest if they are trying to have a date with someone without them knowing.”

“No no no no,” Raph sputtered. “This ain’t no date, this is just two guys at an art show.”

Leo squinted. “Two guys at an art show?”

“Yeah, nothing weird about that, I wouldn’t ask you on a date,” Raph said, coughing into his fist.

At least Raph was as bad of a liar as Casey Jones.

“Right…” Leo said slowly. “But you would trick me into one-”

“I think I heard the phone ringing,” Raph shot up from the bed, “I want ta hear this one for myself. You’ll be ready to go in an hour right? Okay sounds good.”

Leo stared at the empty door frame before sighing and picking up the pencils he had been in the middle of sharpening.

* * *

Around seven that evening the group met up outside the docks where they would pay a small entrance fee and receive a ticket. Luckily the bored young man processing guests didn’t care about four short men walking in with ill fitting clothing. Raph wore his black leather jacket with the collar up and a baseball cap. He used the bill of the hat to keep his face covered. Mikey dressed in a dark gray hoodie and wrapped a bright purple scarf around his face. Don wore one of Raph’s old white hoodies that had a peeling brand logo on it. Sadly given the nature of his bo staff, he was also the only one of them without their most ideal weapon as it couldn’t be hidden in his clothes. He carried a pair of tonfas instead.

Leo wore looser clothing. Instead of jeans like Mikey and Donnie he wore breathable tan fabric that cinched at the waist. He could pull it tightly enough that it wouldn’t slide down his shell. Over that he had a handmade leather cloak. It was a deep marbled brown, soft and malleable from years of wearing and because Leo was a creature of the night the sun rarely touched it. There were no cracks in this skin.

The cloak was a gift from an elderly man in Central America. It was given to Leo when the language still tripped his tongue up, when charades were the only way he got food and advice. Because of this he never learned what animal the leather had come from. It was a question he had always meant to ask but never got around to.

Then again, it was only fitting that Leo was wrapped in the skin of a stranger. At twenty five he felt less and less like himself everyday. So much so that the turtle who received this cloak would be unrecognizable to the one wearing it now.

He brought the cloak closer to himself, blocking the wind, and making sure his swords were concealed at his hip. Instead of the heavy boots his brothers were wearing he chose the shoes Donnie had made them for missions where only fabric wrappings over their feet were no good. They imitated those toed shoes runners wore except there were only two toe spots.

“Why are you dressed like that? Ya look weird.” Raph said, as he pocketed their tickets. Proof that they had paid five dollars to enter the land of art.

Leo hummed. “Yes, I am the one dressed strangely,” he said hiding his amusement. They were all dressed strangely.

Naturally they split up into pairs. Mikey and April going one way with their cameras and enthusiasm, Donnie and Casey going the other way with their shoulders slumped. It was almost like Raph had planned it as such Leo thought, feeling the urge to slip off to a corner for a few hours until it was time to go home.

The art show was being hosted on a half mile stretch of the Atlantic Ocean. A large wooden deck took up one third the narrow width on the stretch. Making twenty feet of balcony into a large expanse of concrete barriers, jumbled and twisted together instead of a beach. The concrete served an important purpose, cutting down on the erosion of the coastline. It wasn’t a beautiful location, but as Leo held onto the chest high railing he saw less of the bloated jacks below him and more of the sparkling ocean far ahead. The sun setting behind him gave the waves a beautiful effect.

They crashed into the cement breakers with a hoarse and whispered roar. Leo closed his eyes and for a second he was standing in the Caribbean Sea wishing his family could feel the sand between their toes and feel the salt on their skin.

It was a different time then.

Raph walked over to him and looked straight down, ignoring the ocean.

“So you just gonna stand here or-” Raph gestured to the booths and sculptures ahead, implying that there was something better than the view they had right then.

Of course very few looked at things the way Leo did.

“I don’t see why not. Everyone has split off to do their own thing anyways,” Leo said casually.

Raph waited, standing stiff before gripping the railing through his leather gloves. “I hate these things,” he said leaning against the railing and looking straight down again.

“Why?” Leo asked, also looking down over the railing. To Leo they looked like stars with flat points. Only about eight feet tall and eight feet wide and molded to be very thick.

“Can’t see the floor but there are all those pockets, who knows what could be hiding in there.”

Leo nodded once, eyeing a large pocket below him with a new sense of foreboding. It did not help that it was getting dark, casting the structures into the shadows. While Leo did not have a fear of the dark, Raph’s comment had him stepping away from the railing.

“Come on,” Raph said, snaking his hand under Leo’s cloak and grabbing his arm, “There’s a live show of a guy carving with a chainsaw.”

“Please tell me you aren’t going to be taking notes,” Leo said, allowing himself to be pried away from his spot of solitude and ocean watching.

Raph released him and they walked together towards the show.

“Or at least give Donnie the time to save up several bags of blood before testing out any new hobbies.”

Raph laughed, “What? You think Sensei would let me take up chainsaw carving?”

“You would do it inside?” Leo asked shocked.

“Well I’m not doing it up here,” he said mimicking Leo’s aghast tone. He rotated his shoulders, “I need full mobility, I can’t be wearing anything that would hinder my performance or make me all sweaty.”

A wonderfully vivid image of Raph coated in sweat while carving something came into Leo’s mind. Fantasy Raph’s biceps vibrated with the motor of the chainsaw. Leo was fortunate the scarf around his face hid the heat rushing from his stomach and up his neck.

“So you’ve put thought into this?” he asked, swallowing and working his jaw in a circle. Wasn’t healthy to get caught up in fantasies about Raph. He had just the right amount of Raph and refused to let himself need or want more.

“No,” Raph said quickly, waving Leo off. “This is all hypothetical.”

“Hypothetical… Yet you’ve thought about it before?”

“Shut up,” Raph huffed. “I can’t appreciate the fine art with you rattling off your conspiracy theories.”

Leo rolled his eyes, Raph didn’t see him thankfully so he was spared another round of arguing. One advantage of being smaller than the art appreciating terrapin.

It was the only advantage that came with that.

* * *

“I haven’t seen Donnie, or Casey since- well since we got here,” Raph pointed out when they accidentally reconvened with April and Mikey at a food stand. They claimed the furthest table away to eat and talk at. Heads pointed toward the ocean so no one but April might see their green muzzles.

April shrugged. “I assume they went back home seeing as when I went out to my car it was gone.”

She held up a large paper bag, something heavy judging by the way it barely moved in the wind.

“Now I have to carry this around,” she sighed out annoyed.

“The two of them leaving is totally lame because now that it’s dark and all the cool things are coming out,” Mikey said with his mouth full of food. "And-,” he said forcefully, “-Donnie said he'd take a picture with me at the Hamster Circus."

He crossed his arms over his shell and pouted.

“I don’t know Mikey, it’s getting pretty windy. They might cancel the circus on behalf of the tiny performers,” April said looking around. Some of the booths and stations with light weight art were struggling to keep their prints on their tables. Tents were still connected to the ground but the wind made them nearly tilt to one side. Artists were packing up and heading out.

A big gust of wind barreled down the pier. Leo, Mikey, and April made a group effort to secure their napkins and food for the incoming rush of air but Raph was in the middle of taking a bite out of his chili dog. It flew out of his hands leaving a very disgruntled turtle behind.

“Heh, eat much?” Mikey joked. He shrunk down when Raph bared his teeth.

Of course now that his chili dog had ascended he started eating Leo’s cheese fries. Why was Leo being punished for the crimes of nature? He didn’t know. All he knew was a very nice fry with a perfect cheese to fry ratio that he had been saving for last was now sliding down Raph’s throat.

Raph rubbed cheese off the corner of his lips and made direct eye contact with Leo before slipping his whole thumb in his mouth.

Leo dug his nails into his thighs to keep his face blank.

“Okay, this one I actually want to see,” April said, holding a flier down on the table. “Mikey and I went by the guy’s tent earlier but he said to come back when it’s dark. He says he has found a rare species of slug during his travels in Central America.”

That did peak Leo’s interest, but sadly the flier for “The Deadly Display” contained no pictures. Not that Leo could have identified many insects. Local villagers and farmers taught him which plants to avoid and how to treat bites and stings. He would thank them in broken jagged Spanish.

That drudged up memories of when he used to try to connect with people, before everything went to shit and he found out the best way to help was from afar.

Leo always had issues returning home a failure, so he stopped making homes.

He did his best to keep everyone an arm's length away. 

April and Mikey got up to use the bathroom together, leaving Raph and Leo alone at the table.

“You want to check it out?” Raph asked, gripping his wrist.

Leo looked up from the flier and the world of his own thoughts. “Sure, but April is right. With this wind I wouldn’t be surprised if the power went out soon.”

“Then we should get ahead of the line,” Raph said, standing up and gathering their trash before it too could be taken by the wind.

* * *

The wind had picked up significantly between eating and walking to The Deadly Display. There was no line so they were able to enter the tent immediately, escaping the biting wind.

Inside there was a man dressed from head to toe in a stereotypical adventurer’s outfit. Something no actual explorer would wear if they were familiar with Central America. So many loops in the clothing and ways to get caught on things.

A small crowd gathered of only people who dressed well enough for the wind outside, now raking itself over the plastic tarp tent. As booths shut down and tents closed people started leaving. Raph and Leo wouldn’t complain about less people, it was less to be paranoid about.

There was a long fabricated spiel from the man, Jonathan Finwick, about where he found the so called slug, one that could be debunked by anyone who’d actually been anywhere in Central America.

Then finally after all that, and the man had advertised his book several times, he revealed the one thing that everyone was actually gathering to see. Hidden behind a curtain until he dramatically pulled it back. It was a large terrarium at first glance. Four feet by four feet and three feet tall. The tank was sitting on a cart with wheels. A curtain around the bottom part of the cart hid what was there, likely the robotic mechanism that controlled Jonathan’s display.

It was hard for Leo to tell what he was supposed to look at. The light was mounted above the terrarium but there were no leaves to be seen. Only very straight vines that bent at precise angles. Like a very large slimy deformed tarantula curled in the corner.

There were two rows of holes drilled in the sides of the terrarium the same size of quarters. So whatever was inside had to be large enough that it couldn’t slip through the holes.

“This, ladies and gentlemen is the most carnivorous slug on the planet,” Jonathan said.

The crowd murmured excitedly.

“Watch carefully,” he said flicking the light above the terrarium.

The white bright light was switched off and a red light flooded the terrarium but nothing happened.

Jonathan tapped the glass aggressively, obviously this was not part of his show.

“Well, uh, one at a time you may come up and look,” Jonathan said, a bit frustrated. “It’ll move soon.”

Being at the front of the line Raph and Leo were the first to see it up close. “So is it a robot or a puppet?” Raph muttered.

Leo stayed silent, there wasn’t much going on inside the terrarium aside from the tarantula. Leo was more inclined to believe this was a statue or robot but there was something eerie about it. The insides didn’t look metal, and there was no fishing line inside the terrarium as far as he could see.

A memory that had been pushed to the back of his mind oozed forward. A memory of thousands of bones congealed together, moving in perfectly calculated motions. Snaking up trees and weaving through the air like huge boned tentacles.

It couldn’t be that though, it couldn’t be the thing it vaguely resemble because there was no way someone as inexperienced as Jonathan Finwick managed to capture it. Not when Leo in all his skill had barely escaped it.

So it couldn’t be that. It couldn’t be.

“You good?” Raph asked when Leo backed up suddenly, running into the velvet rope divider.

His answer died in his throat as the carnivorous plant moved. He saw the leg of the tarantula for what it was. A spine of a small animal barely visible through a thick burgundy brown semi-transparent skin. Unnatural veins and muscle fibers webbed around the bones, moving them however the slug desired. This time it was using a spine and connected pelvic bones as a foreleg and claws. With a soft thud it struck out at the ground digging the small tailbone into the dirt. Before it could move much else Jonathan quickly switched the red light off and turned on what Leo now understood was a UV light.

“There!” Jonathan said, making the creature freeze.

The crowd was really fascinated now, gathering closer and pushing Leo and Raph away.

Raph gripped Leo’s shoulders, a feeling barely noticed through the thickness of his leather cloak.

“As you can see it takes the bones of the animals it has eaten and uses them for support,” Jonathan explained. Now there were too many people gathered around for Raph and Leo to see as the red light was switched on and the UV light turned off.

“Okay, I hate art now,” Raph said with an involuntary shiver that he shrugged off. “What the fuck is that?”

“Not a robot,” Leo said, backing away and pulling Raph with him. They had to get Donnie, but first Leo had to get out of the tent.

* * *

Leo struggled to get through the tent flaps. His whole body was vibrating and there was a panic shooting through his veins.

It couldn’t be here.

Raph grabbed Leo, finally catching up to his frantic pace. He looked at Leo with concern. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Leo jerked out of his grip. “Nothing,” he snapped.

“Then why are you freaking out?” Raph demanded.

He tried to steady his breathing and failed. The wind filled his lungs with forcefully and his chest tightened up. “Call Donnie, and then tell April to go home-”

“Wait, why, what’s going on?”

“We need to kill it,” Leo said, chest heaving. His composure slipping between his fingers.

Raph nodded his head slowly. “We need to kill that guy’s art project?”

“It’s not an art project,” Leo said. “I have seen it before. He does not know what he has brought here. I am surprised it has not escaped yet, for that we are lucky.”

Leo ignored Raph’s skeptical expression and quickly came up with a plan. If they acted quickly then they could kill the monster while it was still inside its terrarium.

“Leo,” Raph said, grabbing his shoulder. “Normally I love it when you point at something and tell me to kill it. I would never complain, but I don’t see what the issue is. What do you mean you’ve seen that before? It looks like someone took a really stretchy glove and slipped some tangled up roadkill inside. It’s probably a commentary on the way we have mutilated nature.”

Leo stared at Raph with shock, even though he somewhat agreed with the description.

“And it’s frozen in place,” Raph said squeezing his shoulders, trying to be reassuring.

“By that UV light,” Leo said, shrugging away from Raph’s suffocating grip. “And what will happen if the power goes out?”

“The light will go off.”

“And?”

“And… the thing will move?” Raph asked, frustrated now. “Leo it’s in a tank.”

“It’s only in that terrarium because the light has never been off long enough for it to escape,” Leo said. “I don’t know how Jonathan captured it but he really should have left it where he found it.”

Raph squinted. “Fine, but after we kill that guy’s life work, you’re making it up to me.”

“I don’t think I’ll be in that kind of mood later,” Leo said huffed absently, while holding his chin in thought. How would they kill the slug if it escaped?

“Asshole, that’s not what I meant. I want you to tell me why the fuck that thing is apparently kill on sight on your book,” Raph demanded, this time getting in Leo’s face.

He was saved from having to answer as April and Mikey walked up. They were using their arms to block the wind.

As Mikey opened his mouth to ask what was going on, seeing the way his brothers were scowling at each other, a noise only comparable to canon went off. People nearby screamed and got down. The lights went out and not far away in the parking lot over the tent tops Leo saw sparks flying from the top of a pole.

“Dammit!” Leo yelled, tearing off towards The Deadly Display.

He avoided people, but shoulder check a man on accident with his haste. April and Mikey stopped to check on him but Leo had to keep running.

When he whipped the doors of the tent open he saw shadows crawl up the side of the tent. The slug in the terrarium was petting the glass walls and it took all of Leo’s will power to walk towards it just as Raph entered behind him

Jonathan was crouched down below the terrarium with the flashlight in his mouth.

“You need to get the light on now!” Leo ordered him, but his eyes were locked on the thing inside the terrarium, touching the quarter sized holes and deciding which bones it would need to leave behind in order to escape.

“I’m trying!” Jonathan said around the flashlight. “The back up battery is dead!”

“Well you gotta do something!” Raph growled now as panicked as Leo. He started to reach out to plug the holes with his hand. Intent on pushing the creature back inside.

Leo struck Raph’s hand away. “Don’t touch it!” he warned.

Raph held his pounding hand and gave Leo a shocked look, but before he could question him, Jonathan was up and panicking at the implication that his life’s work was escaping.

To cover more holes he pressed both his forearms against the glass. “I paid far too much money for you to escape here!” he bellowed through the glass.

“Think he has a warranty?” Raph asked Leo as they both grabbed the back of Jonathan’s jacket.

He swung his arm around, and they ducked. “Let go of me!” he screamed. “I poured my life savings into this piece of shit insect. I barely make a profit on it.”

“Then it’s not worth your life!” Leo argued as Jonathan wrestled out of his coat and pushed them back.

He placed his now bare forearms against the glass and the sticky skin of the slug adhered to him immediately.

“Ah- ah- it burns!” Jonathan screamed, trying to pull his arms off the glass holes only to find he was stuck.

Raph grabbed the back of Jonathan’s shirt and tried to yank him away.

“Stop! You’ll tear my skin off!” Jonathan roared.

“Leave him,” Leo ordered Raph coldly, dropping the coat onto the floor, its owner now dead.

Raph looked at Leo with shock. “What?” he grunted out, still trying to pull the screaming man off the glass. “We can’t just let this thing eat him!”

“The only thing that will save him is getting that monster under sunlight,” Leo snapped.

If the slug got preoccupied eating Jonathan there was a chance they could turn on the UV light and freeze it. Leo crouched down where Jonathan had been and picked up the wet flashlight. He saw many buttons and dials but they were all switched on. 

His hands were fumbling now. The sun had just set, there was no telling how much damage or how big this thing would get by morning. It all depended on how many people it consumed, and how fast.

With a breath of disdain Raph let go of Jonathan leaving him to cry hysterically as his arms were wrapped in the slugs skin. Blood ran down the glass coating it red, every so often the flashlight beam would catch it.

Raph stood back in disgust. Leo knew the feeling all too well. The complete helplessness in watching someone suffer and slowly die with no ability to stop it.

Though a child crying your name held no comparison.

Suddenly Jonathan went slack, his forearms still unnaturally suctioned to the glass, his knees almost touching the ground.

April and Mikey came in looking shocked. They had their own flashlights at least and narrowed in immediately on the dead man.

“Dude, what the shell is going on?” Mikey asked, beaming his light into the terrarium. “What’s that?”

“Keep your distance,” Raph said, putting himself between them and the display. “I don’t know much but I think once it touches you there’s no getting it off. And you’ll really want to get it off if it touches you.”

“Mikey, call Donnie,” Leo ordered, giving up on trying to start the battery. “April make sure no one comes in here.”

April nodded after giving the slug one more look, but she recognized the seriousness in Leo’s voice and didn’t linger. She picked up a stack of fliers before she left. It was a smart idea and would make her appear more official if someone came by to check.

“I got him,” Mikey said holding the phone out. “You’re on speaker dude.”

“ _What’s going on?”_ Donnie asked.

Leo put the flashlight to the glass to confirm his worst fears. It looked like Jonathan had been feeding his project hares. The pile of hare skulls weaved together in a mass at the bottom of the terrarium with muscle fibers and veins pulsed. It was currently sucking out all of Jonathan’s blood and bone marrow.

Just as a hermit crab can move from one shell to another, the slug could move to new bones whenever it deemed it necessary. Jonathan’s hollowed skeleton would provide more than enough room for the monster to move it’s nervous system, and once it did that it would be free from it’s enclosure.

“How quickly can you get back here?” Leo asked.

“ _I’m at April’s so ten minutes if I leave right now,”_ the rustling on Donnie’s end said he was doing just that.

Sadly they didn’t have ten minutes.

“That’s not fast enough,” Leo said angrily.

“Dude what crawled up Leo’s shell and died?” Mikey asked under his breath to Raph.

“How quickly can you get the UV lights from the lair to the art show?” Leo asked, giving Mikey a warning glare.

“ _Well now we’re looking at an hour to dismount them from the ceiling and get them there,”_ Donnie said. _“Why do you need them?”_

The glass was not meant to hold the weight of a grown man, as Donnie finished his question the front part of the terrarium fell off. The glue gave way slowly at first then split apart. A cheaply made enclosure.

Leo grabbed Raph and Mikey pulling them back just as the glass hit the floor and shattered. The slug fell over Jonathan’s body. Now it didn’t even need to leave its old bones

Raph swiped the phone from Mikey. “It’s a carnivorous slug and when it’s under UV lights it doesn’t move. The power went out and the back up for the light is dead. Not that it does any good because it just broke the glass.”

“ _Wait, a slug?”_ Donnie asked.

Leo felt his body go cold. Just seeing it outside the terrarium made it real. He could smell it, he could hear the innards working to eat the soft marrow in Jonathan’s bones. It was completely unbothered by the glass shards. Leo knew with enough time the slug would push them out of its body like nothing.

“Leo!” Mikey shouted, trying to grab his attention.

He whipped his head up to look at Mikey.

“How certain are you that it’ll be stopped by UV light because Donnie is thinking instead of bringing lights, he gets salt.”

“I’m certain,” Leo said, rubbing his fingers together until it hurt. “When I found something like this in Central America I only escaped it because it became exposed to sunlight.”

He looked down at the slug, either there was more than one or burning it on that beach hadn’t worked.

“Okay,” Leo said. “Donnie will get the lights from the lair-”

“ _If the power is out, and according to Consumer’s Energy a transformer blew up-”_

““Man! Michael Bay ruins everything!” Mikey said.

“ _Not that kind of transformer,”_ Donnie said. _“We’ll need another power source- hold on- Casey says his grandmother has a diesel generator.”_

Raph squinted. “Is that the same grandmother who suddenly died and came back to life today?”

“ _He said no, it’s the other one,”_ Donnie said.

“How many grandmothers does he have?” Mikey asked. “Seems like a lot.”

“He has two numbnut-”

“Focus,” Leo barked. “Donnie, get the lights. Casey, get the generator. Everyone else get salt.”

Mikey raised his hand.

“Yes, Michelangelo,” Leo said stiffly.

“What kind of salt?”

“ _Sidewalk salt, otherwise known as rock salt or halite. You can get it at hardware stores or home and gardening centers,”_ Donnie said.

“Great,” Leo said, “now hurry. I am going to keep it away from people for as long as I can.”

Mikey leaned over to Raph and said something into his ear before leaving the tent. Leo hated when his brothers talked about him behind his back.

“You too Raph,” Leo said evenly, jerking his head toward the tent door.

“No,” Raph said and Leo could hear the accompanying shrug in his voice.

Asking what Leo would do if he pushed back. The same kind of voice he would use when Leo was going on day five without a shower.

“I ain't leaving you here.”

“That was an order,” Leo said sternly. “Not a request. Go to The Lair, meet up with Donnie he could use the help with the lights.”

Raph laughed dismissively. “An order?” he asked mockingly. “Sounded more like a joke to me seeing as the set up is how many turtles you think it takes to change a fucking light bulb.”

Leo let out a deep sigh and threw Raph a mean look. One he threw right back at him.

“Donnie and Mikey got each other's backs,” Raph said, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. “Who's got yours?”

A little resentment washed up Leo’s throat. He didn’t need anyone to have his back. He didn’t need anyone fixing his failures for him. No one had his back in Central America all those years ago and he was fine.

He was fine then, and he was fine now.

Still Raph remained, forcing them into a small stare down.

“If we’re going to do this I need to know what you know about our quote unquote enemy,” he said, gesturing to the slug.

The slug was currently arranging a femur into itself. It never used any of the bones correctly. A femur would become a part of its spine, a spine will become its legs. Skulls were most valuable to it. Always in the center. Leo watched with a sick feeling as Jonathan's skull was worked into the mass of hare skulls. Muscle fibers and veins webbed around the skull. A lovely compartment for the slug to put it’s vulnerable nervous system.

“Its size is limited by the amount of bones it has to spread into,” Leo explained. “The one I faced in Central America was huge-”

“How did you kill it?” Raph asked.

“I burned it,” Leo said. “But here it is again.”

The slug started to stand on three unequal limbs. Above the back limb it used Jonathan’s spine like a scorpion’s tail. It was disconnected from Jonathan leaving only his skin and less useful bones behind.

“I’ll distract it,” Leo said, ordering Raph away. “Make sure I have a clear path to run without people and stay out of its reach.”

This time Raph didn’t argue but turned and ran toward the tent opening. “Fuck, I just wanted one date.” 

Leo shook his head and drew his swords. 

“I knew it was a date.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta Reader: [kalachelone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalachelone)

The slug pushed a few more glass shards from its body. They made no noise as they landed on Jonathan’s corpse, or, what was left of his corpse. The slug never took what it didn't need. It ate the soft spongy marrow and drank the blood but all the organs and useless bones stayed behind.

That’s all that would be left of its victims. Husks left to be identified by their clothing and possessions.

The slug turned towards him, not that it necessarily had a front or a back, but Leo could feel it. The dread of being hunted seconds before it galloped forward awkwardly.

Leo swallowed the saliva pooling in his mouth.

He jumped back, sword grips already wet with sweat. He bobbed under the red velvet ropes cordoning off taxidermied animals and venus flytraps suspended in glass.

They circled the inside of the tent for three laps, his flashlight catching the slugs limbs and painting the walls in shadows thick as tree trunks. The slugs scuttling canter filled the dark space with the clicking of bones on concrete. Leo was already breathing too hard as he waited for the right window to strike.

On the fourth lap the slug suddenly stopped and bolted the other way out of the tent. With no other options Leo ran out of the tent in hot pursuit.

Raph was about twenty feet away. “Everyone’s gone home!” he yelled over the roaring wind.

‘ _Was it possible for it to get any windier?’_ Leo wondered.

The slug’s canter was uneven. Its run was stuttered and it often had to catch itself. Far from the looming mass of bones it had been in Central America. Back then it had been huge, when it tightened itself into a rolling blob it was fast.

The smell was the worst part.

The slug had smelled like death and bloated roadkill. The rotten stench burned his nostrils, boiled sewage smelled better.

As he caught up with Raph his legs were vibrating and not from the cold, it was the fear he couldn’t afford to acknowledge.

Wordlessly they ran for several seconds before pausing to wait for the slug to catch up. It slipped on a flier and its leg gave out under it. The slug was as efficiently built as it could be, but it only had so many pieces to play with until it ate someone else.

It gave Leo an idea.

“I’m going for a limb,” he told Raph. “But I want to come up from behind.”

“Is there a behind?” Raph asked, gesturing to it with an open hand. His sais were a short range weapon and for this instance nearly useless.

“You know what I mean,” Leo said, adjusting his swords in his hands, trying to discreetly wipe away some of that sweat. There was sweat between his fingers even.

Raph threw him a “be careful” head jerk as the slug lunged forward.

Leo peeled off ahead and ran round a tent while Raph continued to run straight down the stretch of tents. Keeping himself as silent as possible Leo ran up behind the slug, eyes darting between its limbs. The spine segment would be the easiest to remove so that was what he would aim for first.

He jerked his katana and half the spine flew off.

He’d wanted to cut the tail closer to the base, but his arms were shaking and his heart was hammering in his chest.

The free falling bone segment rolled toward him, and he had to step back quickly to avoid it. It was still coated in that flesh eating acid and Leo didn’t want to find out if that would still burn him even though it was no longer connected.

The slug turned and faced Leo. Then it scuttled forward, its bone-tipped feet scraping on the cement, until it came to the fallen spine. Even without a face it looked annoyed as it lowered itself down on it and reabsorbed it.

The slug left behind the vertebrae that was sliced cleanly in half, and the used napkin that had been next to it.

While the slug was preoccupied with its lost spine, Leo took a swing out of a radius acting as one of its legs. This time aiming to cut the bone open length wise as he ran by.

“Did you miss?” Raph asked, head darting between looking at the slug and making sure no one was approaching them.

The wind rippled through Leo’s cloak causing them both to brace against it.

“No,” he said over the roaring air. “I need to cut the bones open lengthwise so it can’t use them..”

“You think we can immobilize it?” Raph asked.

It had to have a brain, something that controlled it. The one in Central America had shown at least some ability to think, some cunning. So somewhere in the gelatinous mass was something that could be damaged with the right blow. Leo just had to figure out where.

On two limbs and half a tail the slug raised a limb at Leo, practically offering itself up. The radius Leo had just cut in half was now abandoned in two pieces on the ground.

Leo set to work on the slug’s bones hoping this would do enough damage to keep it in one place until he could find its weak spot. His arms grew heavier and heavier with each swing. He had to get enough strength behind each blow to slice through the bones and enough precision to cut open each one to render it useless. After cutting every long bone in half his arms were burning.

For a moment it stayed still, but it had other long bones inside of it. Leo had only been able to get to a few vertebrae and a couple of arm bones. But for some reason, the slug wasn’t making new limbs. It was just squirming there between Raph and Leo.

They stepped back slowly until they were about fifteen feet away.

Raph gave him a scowl before turning back to keep the slug in view, but he held back any questions. He had to keep the flashlight on the thing, but that just made what was inside it more visible. Several hare skulls looked out at them slowly being shunted around and rearranged.

Leo wanted to tell Raph to point his flashlight anywhere else. Just seeing the skulls in there made Leo’s stomach cramp and squirm. But they had to keep it in sight.

The wind picked up just then and suddenly Leo’s nose was filled with the smell of dead bodies. His eyes watered. That smell. The smell brought back so many memories. His heart was being squeezed.

The trees around the art show rustled and the sound of it was the same sound the slug made back in the jungle. The wind became distorted, became a buzz in his ears.

Behind his eyelids black clouds of flies billowed up from the jungle floor. In Central America, the flies followed the slug everywhere, feasting on its victims’ remains. The flies would run straight into him in their hurry, into his mouth and eyes. The hum had followed him home, some days overwhelming him so that it was all that he heard and no amount of hiding in his bed could silence them.

Leo stood frozen. His body itched as flies crawled all over his skin.

The slug rolled forward suddenly.

Leo sling shot himself back into the present and pushed Raph back.

“Run!” Leo shouted. And they took off, throwing garbage cans and painted canvases in its path, weaving around tents and booths to get as much distance in between them and try to slow it down.

Behind them, the slug wove through the debris, turning on a dime and never slowing down. It was so fast. So much faster than the one in Central America.

“Up!” Leo panted to Raph, “We have to get up above it!”

Raph pointed to the pavilion where they had gotten food earlier.

Leo nodded. That would work until it learned how to climb.

* * *

They scrambled up a column to the roof of the pavilion, one of the few permanent structures on the pier. Everything else was booths, card tables, and tents, most of which had been knocked over by the wind. Leo looked out over the abandoned festival grounds for other places they could use as high ground. Besides the pavilion, there was a line of portapotties, and beyond that a large uhaul truck.

Below them, the slug was tapping around the foot of the pavilion with its bone feet. The narrow columns holding up the roof didn’t give it enough to latch onto. It stepped back and Leo was sure it was looking at them, but it couldn’t find a way up.

The two turtles lay flat on their plastrons to not be knocked over by the wind and watched the slug try again with another column. Leo was breathing hard, and Raph reached under his cloak to lay a hand on his shell.

“I don’t see any eyes, how is it still chasing us?” Raph asked.

“I never learned exactly how it hunts. I don’t think it can hear, but perhaps it can smell,” Leo said.

Raph thought about that. “Might be our heat?”

They weren’t cold blooded. They were more sensitive to temperature than humans, which made them tire faster, but they weren’t completely reptilian. They gave off a heat signature.

“And we’re the only heat source around right now,” Leo added.

“Shit,” Raph barked.

The slug had given up trying to scale the side of the pavilion and had somehow made its way to the top of one of the last standing tents. It stood poised, two bone limbs outstretched, directly across from them.

They scrambled to their feet.

“Sherlock figured out climbing,” Raph said.

Leo nodded. “It learns,” he said quietly.

To Leo’s horror the slug was balanced perfectly on one limb in harsh wind conditions. The slug had so much control over its fine movements.

And given how quickly that improvement came...

Raph tilted it’s head side to side. “He ain’t even struggling to balance anymore and he’s got like two limbs.”

“It’s rearranged them. They’re farther apart,” Leo said.

Raph nodded, “Better balance.”

As they watched, the slug positioned itself on the edge of the tent. Using one front limb it felt the open air it was about to walk onto. It paused for a second as if it was building up the courage to jump.

And then it jumped.

They leapt back and watched as the outstretched spinal column that the thing had curved into a hook just barely missed the edge of the roof.

It hit the ground with a splat. Leo winced at the sight of the slug now a puddle. There were bones sticking straight up out of the glob. One of its longer bones, a tibia Leo thought, had broken clean in half.

“I have never seen it leap,” Leo said. “It even broke bones doing that.”

“Is it dead?”

Leo let out an uncertain hum. “I do not know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Raph asked. “I thought you’ve dealt with this before?”

Leo hesitated. “The one I encountered in Central America was huge. It didn’t need to climb. It had enough mass it could reach up through the trees…”

It had been something out of a horror story, the way the slug reached towards him. When the only place to land was covered in its flattened body like a sticky trap for rats.

“Limbs as thick as a human body,” he continued. “I could be twenty feet above it and it would sense me.”

Raph was mad now, giving Leo a twisted up look.

“And you never thought to share this story with us?” he asked it as if he was entitled to know. “When we asked you about the Fivefold Path the time you went up against a ginormous bone harvesting slug just slipped your mind?”

To explain the slug Leo would have to explain Mateo, the elderly man that looked past Leo’s form and taught him most of the Spanish he knows to this day. He would have to explain why he couldn’t just go home after all that. How, so close to being done with his training, he failed the fifth path.

His family would not understand what was so awful about facing Mateo with the news of his grandchildren; Bruno and Manuel. Who cared if Mateo blamed him for their deaths and sent him away? Leo banished himself before he could find out. He had killed the slug, that was good enough.

“Well?”

“What brother would I be to bring back such a story to my family when we live in a dark system of tunnels?” Leo asked.

Raph laughed once and threw his head back. “Oh so it was to spare us?”

“Yes.”

“How did you kill it then?” he pushed. “Can you at least share that part of the story or would it scare me?”

It would probably scare Donnie into giving Leo a chest x-ray if he heard about the week he spent struggling to walk more than ten minutes at a time. 

“I burned it,” he said gesturing around. “Which even if we did find a place and a way to set it on fire without drawing attention, that apparently doesn’t actually kill it.”

Raph thought about that for a few seconds. “What if you did kill it and there is more than-”

In the silence they heard the faint click of bone on cement. They peered over the edge of the roof to find the slug moving.

“Jesus, it’s still alive?”

As they watched, the gelatinous mass pulled itself together. It’s center rippled as bones were rearranged, broken ones discarded, new ones emerging to replace them.

They both jerked to the sound of a dog barking. They both immediately got their weapons out. Stray dogs were rarely friendly towards them and risking rabies was never an option even if they had their vaccinations for it.

“Not a dog!” Raph yelled. “Not tonight!”

The dog appeared at the other end of the long row of porta potties. It was a large dog, a brown and white mastiff mix. Still barking it’s head off, it started to warily approach the slug.

Down below, the slug rolled off its discarded bones and paused.

“It’s going to eat the dog,” said Leo.

On cue, the slug started towards the dog. It was slower now, not having the right arrangement of bones for speed. But the dog showed no intent to flee and instead stalked toward the slug.

Not wanting to risk moving to ground, the turtles leapt from the pavilion roof to the nearest porta pottie. It wobbled a little, and Leo had a horrible image of falling into sewage fill his mind, but the structure steadied and from there they leapt as lightly as they could from stall to stall keeping up with the standoff that was happening below.

Leo thought about throwing something at the dog to make it run. Raph of course went the loud route and started yelling.

“Go on! Get outta here!”

The dog stopped and looked up at them just as the slug began to pick up speed.

Leo started running with Raph right behind him. They got to the end of the line of portapotties and leapt at the dog trying to grab it and drag it away.

Their leaps were apparently too much for the toilets and behind them Leo heard the sound of john after john, getting knocked down like dominoes.

Still the slug came.

As they lunged forward the dog slipped through Leo’s legs.

Leo turned just in time to see the dog run head first into the oncoming body of the slug.

“-Nevermind,” he sighed as the slug wasted no time engulfing the dog’s head.

“We can still pull it out!” Raph stalked toward the pair.

Leo held him back. “It’s too late, Raph.”

“It’s still kicking! It’s still alive!”

“There is nothing we can do to save it now,” Leo sighed.

The slug had managed to draw in half of the large dog’s body. There was no place to grab the dog that didn’t get them close enough to become dinner as well.

“Fucking face first too,” Raph said with disgust.

“It will go quickly at least,” Leo said. “Many do not.”

It was meant to reassure Raph as he did have a soft spot for animals. Instead he was looking at Leo with concern.

They watched the dog try with all its strength to scurry back from the slug but it’s head was covered now. Parts of the slug were already entering the dogs mouth. More veins swam through the slugs matrix, up the dog’s face and into its ears.

There was no more twitching after that.

* * *

“Leo?” Raph said, nudging him. “It’s doing something.”

They had climbed up onto the roof of the large uhaul to wait for Donnie and the others, hoping the smell of the diesel truck would cover their scent. The slug had rolled a little ways away into the shadows cast by the downed portapotties, but Leo and Raph could still see it clearly enough.

Off white shards were being pushed out the sides of the slug. The slug was pushing white shards of bone out of its sides. After the smaller pieces came the bones that were just broken.

“It can’t use them,” Leo guessed.

“You said the bigger it is the slower it is right?” Raph asked.

Leo adjusted his cloak over his swords.

“It will still be fast, stay alert and let’s hope no other animals get curious.”

Raph reached under Leo’s clock and placed his hand on Leo’s shell.

“Donny better get his ass here soon,” Raph grumbled.

All they could do was wait.

As he watched the slug digest and arrange its new acquisitions, he felt pulled back to his time in the jungle, waking up coughing his lungs out with a hallucination of his father standing over him, telling him he had failed his training and would have to do it over again.

When Leo had found Mateo’s grandchildren poking at the skin carcasses he had scolded them. He felt in that moment like his own father likely had when he was a child. There were many times when Leo and his brother’s had poked through things in the sewers to Master Splinter’s dismay. It was only natural for children to poke things they did not understand.

He had tried not to obsess about it. Whether he should have sent them home immediately or let their curiosity infect him.

The what ifs kept him up at night. The should haves, and guilt burned his eyes open. Did the slug care about killing? Or did it simply want more bones? Did it hear Bruno screaming for Manuel to kick it off?

“Are you… okay?” Raph asked slowly.

“I just rolled an ankle during that last sprint, but it’s nothing that can’t be dealt with later.”

Raph tapped his own temple. “I meant up here. In your head.”

Leo put on his best stony expression. “Of course,” he said firmly. “I am only concerned about it getting too big to be stopped by our lights.”

He was far from the nervous breakdown Raph thought he was bordering on. Even then he had only had the one or two this year, and they were not the big deal Raph made them into. He was shaking from the cold, and his mind was only distracted because he was still trying to work out how they would kill the slug.

Raph nodded in the same annoyed way he did when Leo pushed him away after an episode. “Got it,” he said with an edge to his words. “You’re just going to bring another monster home that we don’t talk about.”

“We are talking about it,” Leo bit out through his chattering teeth. “This is the only thing we’ve been talking about.”

“Are we talking about it? Because all I see is you getting fucking broody again,” Raph spat.

“I’m not doing this right now, I refuse to get drawn into an argument,” Leo said, turning his shoulder away.

“It’s a conversation!”

“You’re yelling!”

“So are you!”

“I wouldn’t be yelling if you weren’t yelling!”

Raph brought his fist down on the metal roof. “I wouldn’t be yelling if you just fucking talked to me!”

“About what?” Leo demanded.

“About this goddammit,” he said, gesturing to Leo and not the slug waiting for them to jump off. “About the fucking shit you bring home and hide from us.”

Leo shook his head. “I’m not hiding this-”

“Yeah you are. You never talk to us about the Fivefold Path, you never explain why you keep that packed bag under your bed. You left all those years ago and came back with this huge pile of emotional shit that you deny even exists,” Raph exploded, leaving his voice to ring in Leo’s ears.

And on one hand Leo knew that Raph had been nothing but patient, always making sure Leo ate and drank while having his episodes of self doubt and doing more than getting out of bed to use the restroom was too much.

On the other hand a deep pang of humility shot through him like a volt of electricity. The shame that he even had those days. Sometimes all he could think about were all his horrible mistakes. Where every screw up seemed to crawl out of the walls and straight into his stomach until he would curl up defeated under a mountain of blankets, waiting for the rocks in his stomach to stop cutting him from the inside out.

“What do you want from me?” Leo asked without showing a reaction. “I was gone for two years. I was alone for two years,” he said, parroting the default excuse he also had to explain anything weird about his behavior.

The panic attacks.

The nightmares.

The crippling paranoia.

“You’re not alone now but you still act like it. You act like you’re even more alone than you were before you left,” Raph said, reaching over to touch Leo’s shoulder before cupping the back of his neck with a gentleness that belied the firmness of his voice.

Before Raph’s hand could run up to his face, Leo jerked away. “Just because we sleep together doesn’t mean I have an obligation to tell you about everyone of my failures.”

Raph’s hand dropped away at the same time Leo processed the words that came out of his mouth.

“I didn’t-”

“Yeah you did,” Raph cut in quietly.

Leo felt his chest constrict. Why had he said such an awful thing. And why now. Why had his mood gone so suddenly sour tonight. “Raph-”

“No, it’s fine I always wonder where we stood on that anyways,” Raph said tightly. “Since you never fucking talk to me I never know if we’re like Mikey and Donnie or just scratching each other’s shells.”

“Hey you can’t be up there!” someone yelled as a flashlight beam illuminated them. They held their arms up to block the light.

“Sewer apples,” Raph said under his breath, adjusting his cap to cover his face.

“Let me handle this,” Leo said, barely moving his mouth.

Not that he had any idea how he was going to convince the security guard to leave. They both stood up slowly.

“Get down from there, boys,” the man said. He looked past them at the destruction beyond. “What did you do to the porta-potties? All right, I’m calling your parents right now.”

“You think Master Splinter still knows how ta answer the phone?” Raph muttered.

Leo pointedly ignored him.

“That wasn’t us sir,” Leo said.

The security guard made a noise of disbelief. “Then who did? I don’t see anybody else?”

He strode toward them, getting closer to the slug he probably couldn’t even see because his flashlight was pointed at the roof of the truck.

“You have to get out of here there’s a- a- a threat,” Leo said, struggling to say anything else.

The security guard paused, for a second Leo thought he was actually listening to him. Then he reached for his holster.

“Leo-” Raph hissed, gripping the back of his cloak with the intent of yanking him out of the path of a possible bullet.

“Not us! Not us!” Leo said, waving his arms frantically. “There’s a monster!”

The security guard's posture slumped. “Come on kid I ain’t falling for that-” he started to say as he pointed his flashlight around the ground anyways and saw the gelatinous pile of bones. “What in God’s name is that?!”

“It’s a Carnivorous Slug,” Leo said, knowing he sounded ridiculous. “From Johnathan… Johnathan-”

“Johnathan Dickwick,” Raph whispered.

“From Johnathan Dickwick’s tent. He brought it back from Central America,” Leo explained. “It escaped and started chasing us. We saw it kill a dog.”

Raph stepped closer too, “Yeah and it was totally nasty Mister.” He said it with an exaggerated hand motion.

“What are you doing?” Leo hissed at him.

“Talking like a kid?” Raph guessed.

The security guard, which Leo could now see without being blinded, unholstered his gun and pointed it at the slug. He was an older man with tan skin and a bushy gray mustache. He was slim but not in his prime. Slug food for sure. “You two boys run for the exit,” he said while reaching for his radio with his other hand. “I got this handled-”

The slug chose that moment to jerk upright startling the guard who fumbled and dropped his radio.

“Don’t let it touch you!” yelled Leo, “It’ll burn you!”

The guard stepped back several feet and brought his gun forward.

As soon as the safety was clicked off Raph pulled Leo down onto the roof of the truck. His grip on Leo’s arm was so tight it hurt.

One gunshot went off.

It was loud and it broke the air. It hit the cement and ricocheted to the bottom of the truck. It was a pause from the wind. For a few seconds afterwards all Leo could hear was static. He pressed his forehead against the metal roof. His chest heaved, pulling in air violently. This felt like a nightmare that he couldn’t wake up from.

“I got him boys, he’s dead,” the security guard announced.

Leo raised his head, there was no way it was dead after one through and through shot.

Raph army crawled to the edge of the truck roof and looked over. Leo followed behind him.

The slug had frozen posed to strike. It was perfectly still. Its skin wasn’t even rippled by the wind.

“You can come down now-” The guard started to put away his gun.

“Idiot!” Raph muttered, “They always think one shot is just going to do the trick.”

The slug rolled forward into a wide half moon shape, advancing on the guard in what could almost be mistaken for a pincer maneuver.

“What the hell-” the guard stammered, and brought his gun up so fast for a moment he was pointing it directly at Leo and Raph.

Raph and Leo scrambled back from the edge of the truck.

The guard shot and the slug stiffened again.

“No,” Leo said.

Raph shot him a concerned look. “What? No, what? What’s going on?”

He shook Leo’s shoulder, but Leo shrugged him off and stood up.

“No, no, no, no-” he whined out in distraught as he got to his feet. “RUN!” he yelled to the guard, cupping his hands around his mouth. It didn’t matter if the man saw his green hands now.

“Leo!” Raph yelled. “What are you doing?”

“Get on something high now!” Leo yelled, getting dangerously close to the edge of the truck. The wind wrapped his cloak around him and whipped in the wind, his balance teetering for a second.

The security guard decided to listen this time and turned to run, but he had barely took a step before the slug was moving again, so fast this time Leo could barely process it.

And Leo’s heart sank. It could always move that fast, they hadn’t been barely out running it. The slug had just been forcing them to run as fast as they could.

“Is it me or is it moving way faster?” Raph asked. “Leo? Is it moving faster?”

“It was playing with us. This whole time it was playing with us.”

“Oh, well that’s wonderful,” Raph deadpanned. “That’s great, that’s good to know that the thing has been not killing us for fun.”

But instead of rolling forward toward the guard, it seemed instead to unfurl. It extended itself in long arms on either side of the guard.

The guard aimed his gun with trembling hands, but didn’t get a shot off before the slug rolled up on him, forcing the guard to stumble back to stay out of the grip of the slug’s appendages.

“It’s herding him,” Leo said. “It can herd people.”

“You ever see it do that in Central America?” Raph asked.

“I-”

The guard shot the slug again and stiffened. It was for the better that the noise shut Leo’s mouth for him, he had almost answered Raph’s question on an impulse.

Raph pulled them back down into a crouch now that the guard was shooting again. “We can’t do shit if he keeps shooting the slug-”

“And the slug pauses every time he shoots to trick him into thinking that it’s doing something,” Leo added.

“Think it has taught us to think we are safe up high?” Raph asked.

Leo swallowed. He certainly hadn’t been safe in the trees but he thought its smaller size meant it couldn’t reach up and grab them.

“Help! Somebody help me!” the security guard called over the howling wind.

“The slug is using him as bait,” Raph said.

There was nothing they could do. His head hurt, his whole body felt hot and covered in sweat. The humid rotten air filled his lungs. A brother tried to pull another from ankle deep red and brown amber. Screaming their heads off.

Bruno and Manuel were like twins. Never more than four feet from each other and always in arm’s reach of trouble. And if Leo could do it all over again he would have taken them home to Mateo, he wouldn’t have told them to go home, he would have grabbed them and forced them to leave.

Now he wondered if the slug would have let them leave the jungle at all. Did it hunt, did it learn, did it know which one of them it was going to eat first?

“Leo-”

He shook his head, not in the mood to answer Raph’s questions. He felt sick and dizzy and like the air was void of all oxygen.

“Shut up,” he panted out. “I need,” he sucked in air. “I need, to think-”

He sat on his legs and put his palms on the cold truck. Tried to focus on that.

Raph came to stand in front of him and grip the top part of his carapace through his leather cloak. “Don’t do this right now,” he grunted, gripping and releasing Leo’s shell. Hard to really massage a carapace through clothing.

Leo pressed his forehead against Raph’s thigh. Still gulping air. Still cold and hot, sweating and freezing, out of breath and full of rotten stench.

Bruno screamed for Manuel. The language is indecipherable, but the fear is clear. Leo didn’t need to know Spanish perfectly to see that Manuel was being eaten and knew it.

“If you don’t stop doing that right now I’m telling Donnie about all the times you’ve done it,” Raph threatened over the guards calls for help.

Leo wished he could plug his ears, as awful as it was. The guards voice was high and panicked and the wind carried Manuel’s voice out of his thoughts. The guard started screaming Bruno’s name and Leo let got of the truck and gripped the leather fabric of Raph’s pants.

“I’m, meditating-”

“You’re hyperventilating.”

“I am, just, meditating, quickly,” Leo struggled to say through gasps of air. “You wouldn’t, understand, you don’t, meditate.”

“I googled it!”

Leo pressed his head harder into Raph’s thigh. “You can’t, trust, the, internet.”

“Oh come on!”

“No, lot’s, of, strangers, on, there.”

“No,” Raph said. “The security guard is on the railing.”

Leo let go of Raph’s legs and spun around. It was hard to see but the guard was on the railing. Somehow balanced in the high winds. “If it gets down there we will never get the light on it.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” Raph said, taking Leo’s hand and hauling him to his feet and they jumped off the truck.

Leo was full of helpless dread as they ran. If the security guard fell the slug would follow it and have the perfect shelter from the UV lights. They needed to keep the slug up on the pier, but-

Leo put his arm out and stopped them further from the slug than they had in the past, about thirty feet. “Wait,” he said.

The security guard was now on the other side of the railing, shimmying himself to the side. Leo wasn’t sure what his plan was but the slug followed from the other side slowly.

“We can’t-” he stammered. “It’s baiting us, it’s moving so slowly.”

“Fuck.”

“They were bait...” Leo mumbled.

“Who was-?”

“Sh-shit!” the guard yelled as he lost his grip and fell backwards. The noise his body made on the concrete was a muffled crunch followed by an ear splitting scream.

Leo and Raph both fought the impulse to run forward, with the slug right there waiting for them to move.

“There is nothing we can do,” Raph said. He was just repeating what they already knew.

The guard moaned and cried out, the guilt was already settling in.

“No, there isn’t,” Leo agreed. Not because he needed to hear it, but because Raph did.

There was now a completely innocent man’s blood on his hands. And none of that belonged to Raph.

The slug rolled up and over the railing with ease. Molding it’s body to the posts and pushing up in one fluid motion.

“It could climb the whole time,” Raph said, staring at where the slug had been.

“It was teaching us to think it couldn’t,” Leo said., walking forward after the slug.

“Leo-”

He shrugged out of Raph’s grip. “If we lose it down there we aren’t finding it again,” he said, gripping the railing as the slug shimmied down the support beam into the concrete garden below them.

“No you don’t!” Raph said, pulling him off the railing and dragging him away from the edge. “You got a fucking death wish?”

Leo struggled to get his footing as he was being dragged from behind. “Let go of me,” he grunted.

“How does you going down there get it back up here?” Raph said, pushing Leo further away from the railing and standing in his way. “We can’t exactly haul it up if we find it.”

“I’ll go down there and lure it out,” Leo said, weaving together the loose threads of what he had to do.

“No, we know that thing is faster than we thought. That’s a death wish. We stay up here and wait for the others,” Raph snapped.

They didn’t have time for this. And frankly the knowledge that this slug purposely played with Bruno and Manuel made Leo angry. He needed to end this, he needed the slug to see it was him who got the better of it in the end.

“It could be gone by then,” Leo glared. “I’m the one with the most experience anyways.”

“You aren’t using yourself as bait,” Raph said.

“We’re already bait. We’re probably bait so when the others get back it can start picking us off one by one.”

This wasn’t something they could stall on. Leo had to act now, while the slug was busy. He had to get down there and slice at it and maybe find some sort of home bone, the slug’s center.

Raph wouldn’t bend.

“This is my responsibility,” Leo argued. “I should have killed it in Central America. I thought I did. Who knows how many people died because I wasn’t-, because I walked away. I should have dug through everything, left nothing unturned.”

The fire hadn’t reached all of the slug. Some of it burrowed away under the sand and escaped him. He could only dig and search through the ashes for so long. His hands and front were already tender from the fire, not burnt, but kissed by flames. And his lungs…

He thought he might never breathe the same again.

“Did it hurt you?” Raph asked, lowering his voice slightly. The same voice he has when he presses glasses of water to Leo’s mouth on the bad days.

“It doesn’t hurt you,” Leo bit out, frustrated that Raph didn’t understand the thing he refused to explain. “If it hurts you then it is eating you.”

“Did you get hurt trying to escape it then?”

Leo looked away, “Not important.”

“Yes important,” Raph pushed. “You would never leave something like this unfinished Leo.”

‘So then why did I?’ he wondered.

“You lose someone to this? You said you protected communities down there. Did this slug attack someone and you took the blame because you were around?”

“I made a bad call, and then another bad call, and another one!” he yelled. “And I kept making them because I was scared and now it’s here. Tell me that isn’t the universe telling me I have to pay. I have to do this!”

“No you don’t!” Raph yelled. “Whatever happened wasn’t your fault.”

“You don’t know that,” Leo growled as he tried to push past Raph. “Now let go of me.”

Raph pushed him back, “Tell me what happened.”

“Now is not the time,” Leo said, looking up into Raph’s hardened glare. “The slug is slipping into a crevice right now as we waste time talking about the past.”

Raph curled his lip up. “It’s never the time.”

Leo sensed them before he heard or saw them. “The others are here,” he said, removing Raph's hands and stepping away. “Make sure you keep the conversation on what’s important,” he warned.

Raph scowled. “Don’t go down there.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Leo said, his eyes locked on Donnie and Casey as they came over, rolling a cart from Donnie’s lab. The generator was on the lower part of the cart and the UV light was on the top.

“You’re right, it’s yours,” Raph said, standing too close behind Leo. “And I am asking you to not go down there. That’s suicide.”

“Where is it?” Donnie asked, shining his flashlight all around.

Leo stepped away from Raph to give Donnie a quick summary of what had happened. “A security guard found us and the slug chased it over here, the guard got on the other side of the railing and fell. The slug ate him and is now under the cement structures.”

The group looked over the edge, Casey let out a low whistle.

“Dolos,” Donnie said.

Casey snorted. “They did not name them that.”

“Not dildos,” Donnie flicked him. “Dolos. They are man made structures that protect coastlines from erosion.”

Casey rubbed his upper arm sourly. “Oh, right, I knew that.”

Leo took advantage of their small distraction to get on the other side of the railing. “Get the light on, shine it on me as soon as you can. I’ll find it and we’ll go from there.”

The last thing he saw before jumping down was Raph’s disapproving glare.

* * *

Casey tossed him a flashlight and they all demanded very angrily he stay put until they got the generator running and the lights on. Leo obliged despite knowing they had more than enough time to get everything set up before the slug was finished with the security guard.

The dolos were crusted with bird poop, and below them there was mostly litter. Every scrape of plastic and Styrofoam made Leo’s heart jump, it sounded like bones tickling concrete.

The generator was too loud for them to talk or even yell over. As they walked down the pier Leo hopped from one dolo to the next checking the crevices with his flashlight to see into areas the UV lights didn’t reach. Sometimes a piece of litter, a stray piece of faded white plastic would trick him. He felt down here in the dolos like he was in the trees above a deadly forest floor.

He shook the thought out of his head.

Once they had it located they would need to draw it out and burn it with fire under UV lights, that was his only objective. Find the slug and try to lure it out from the safety of the dolos.

As he hopped across a sizable gap, his foot slipped on a slime covered bone stretched over the shadowed side on the next dolo. Leo twisted his body midair trying to reach behind him for the dolo he had just leapt off. He dropped his flashlight in an attempt to grab a horizontal prong on one of the dolos but it was too large around. He slipped off and fell backwards, his shell hit the dolo behind him and bounced him forward. He had just enough time to put his arms up to shield his head and neck before impact. He hit the sand and rocks on his back, completely winded, with two long concrete burns bleeding down the length of his forearms.

“Leo!” several voices yelled from above as he struggled to take a full breath of air. Coughing and heaving. His cloak was flipped up and wedged between two dolos. He tore out of it and lunged for his flashlight, half buried and barely glowing through the dirt.

As he grabbed it the light fell on the brownish red glob of the slug’s body and the human skull just visible through its skin.


End file.
